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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Also: Video of two Nebraska state senators telling arch-homophobe Sen. Beau McCoy to get himself a dictionary during rancorous debate of LB586, LGBT antibias job bill

In April, Marin Cogan profiled, for New York Magazine, Chicago lawyer Laura Ricketts, who is the daughter of Joe Ricketts (billionaire founder of Omaha's TD Ameritrade), the sister of anti-gay marriage Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts, a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, a top Obama campaign bundler and a leading fundraiser for LGBT causes, including Lambda Legal.

On her childhood in Omaha:

“When I was 5, I wore a tie and I wanted to
change my name to Larry, which probably tipped my parents off that I was
gay.” Today, she says, she can’t imagine running for office. “I don’t
really like politics, to be honest,” she says. “But it’s other people
making decisions about my life, and my country, and my child’s education
… I wish we didn’t have so much money in politics, but that’s not the
world we live in. If we don’t play here, we forfeit. And I’m not willing
to forfeit my rights.”
Laura was an all-star softball player in the years after Title IX,
the only daughter in a house full of boys.

How she came out:

“I wasn’t gay! I just kept falling in love with
my best friend, that’s all,” she says, laughing. Only when she returned
to Chicago after law school did she figure it out. She sat her parents
down the day after Thanksgiving and delivered a statement she’d
rehearsed. “I just said, ‘There’s something going on with me, it’s been
going on for a long time. I’ve tried to deny it, I’ve tried to ignore
it, but it’s just who I am.’ ” She was in her early 30s.

What her conservative GOP father told her:

“You’re a leader,” she says her father told
her. “And you can help other young women to come out. You gay people
don’t know how to market your cause. You need to do micromarketing — you
need to get on the ball!” And then, she says, “He said, ‘You always be
proud of who you are. Because I am.’ ” She pauses for a moment, chokes
up. “And then he said, ‘If anybody ever gives you trouble you tell
me.’ ” She apologizes, dabs her eyes. “I said, ‘Because you’re going to
beat them up?’ He was like, ‘Oh, no. I would hire somebody to take care
of it.’ ”

Read the entire interview, including how she cancels out the conservative efforts of her brother, Todd, here at New York Magazine.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.